


promises, swear them to the sky

by satellites (brella)



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-30
Updated: 2013-09-30
Packaged: 2017-12-28 01:17:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/985919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/satellites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One day he's hauling dozens of tons of tech across the galaxy; the next he's being assimilated into a gang of space pirates. Things like this don't normally just <i>happen</i> – not to people like Wally.</p>
            </blockquote>





	promises, swear them to the sky

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired heavily, oh so heavily, by my archenemy [murrmernator's _Young Justice_ futuristic AU](http://murrmernator.tumblr.com/tagged/fabulous-future-fun). Killer stuff. Even though I sooo hate her, and that's why I'm writing her this as a birthday present.

“Cuz, if you don’t get this thing going at least a billion light years faster in the next ten seconds, I am gonna go stir crazy and then I’m gonna unplug you and then I’m gonna throw you into space, and then you know what? You’re never gonna get laid. So please, please, please, please  _pleeeeeease_ , pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease, kick this bucket of bolts into overdrive before I become an intergalactic fugitive for killing you,  _okay_? Please!”

It’s a Wednesday – technically, calendar weekdays were named obsolete and antiquated about twenty years ago, but they all have nice sounds to them, you know? – and this is Wally West’s life.

A pulse of something ripples up his right arm, through the veins, and comes to a head at the erratically flickering, round I/O plug on his shoulder. It brightens, a brief burst of orange, and the ship jumps onward infinitesimally faster.

Before you ask, no, he doesn’t  _exactly_  know how he and Bart Allen, the chattering and hyperactive stowaway – okay, not a stowaway; just his cousin, maybe? – next to him, are related. It just sort of happened, and now every time he goes out on a shipment, the little auburn-haired psycho has to tag along and talk over the radio.

Space coasts by at an indolent pace around them, an endless sea of black peppered with stars and clusters of neon hyperjump gates to Andromeda, Hoag’s Object, the Magellanics, Omega Centauri. A flashing hologram that they pass promises gambling and girls on Carpo, new housing developments on Europa; the one beside it asks for cryogenic freezing volunteers to report to Io. The loud greens and blues splash eerie color into the crevices of the machinery in the pilots’ module.

Wally can see two other cargo ships far in front of them, and one behind. The things move with perpetually groaning indolence, an endless creaking drag across deep space, barely crawling from planet to planet. Wally’s uncle, Barry, had retired from the interspace shipping business only a few years ago, leaving Wally in charge of what has to be the slowest ship in the galaxy, and Wally’s been attached at the hip to it ever since.

And at the shoulders. And at the hands. And at the calves. And sort of at the temples, depending on whether or not he plans on sleeping.

Bart pulls absolutely none of the weight, slumped petulantly in the copilot’s seat with joints and a head unaltered by the ever-thrumming I/O plugs on Wally’s.

“Will you let it go?” Wally snaps back, drumming his fingers on the twin-lever steering device to the beat of the static-garbled music on the radio. “We’re almost there. But for the record, this is the  _last_  time I bring you on a haul with me.”

“Aw, come onnnnn!” Bart whines, throwing his hands in the air – he’s wiry, and quick on his feet, but avoids laborious situations at all costs and instead passes the time by driving Wally to the brink of homicide. “By ‘almost there’ you probably mean we aren’t gonna get there for 37 hours or something; this is  _torture_. Can’t I at least stretch my legs in the—”

“No,” Wally says immediately.

He knows exactly what Bart’s on the brink of asking about, too: the Flash, Wally’s pride and joy, an armed zipcraft with VTOL capabilities and an unmistakable coat of bright yellow paint, presently docked in the cargo hold. “You are  _not_  touching my baby. We’ve been over this a thousand times.”

“Let’s go for a thousand and one, then,” Bart chirps, but at Wally’s sidelong scowl, he goes for a different tactic. “Just for a second? A tiny,  _miniscule_  second. I’ll barely go five feet.” He clasps his fingerless gloved hands at his chin, blinking his green eyes pitifully in Wally’s unresponsive direction. “I’m dyin’ in here, Walls; I’m gonna chew my arm off in a second if I don’t get to do  _something_.”

“You’re the genius who thought coming along was such a great idea,” Wally retorts, smirking. “I told you it’d be a drag, twerp, but did you listen? No. Because who never listens to his wise cousin Wally? You.”

“You are such a  _bummer_ ,” Bart groans, flopping back in the chair. “How am I even  _related_  to you?”

“Trust me, it’s not voluntary,” Wally says dryly. The song on the radio fades and a new one creeps on, hard-hitting drums and horns and vibraphones. “Seriously, though? We’ve probably only got another 3 hours ’til we hit Mars.”

“Then on the way home we can stop at Ganymede, right?” Bart asks enthusiastically, bouncing in his seat.

Wally pulls a face. “As if.” He scoffs, shaking his head. “Perv.”

Bart grumbles audibly and indelicately, folding his arms and pouting. Wally snorts, letting slip a chuckle, and that makes Bart loosen just slightly.

“Go to sleep, little dude,” Wally tells him easily, stretching. The wires snaking out from the ports in his arms and temples shimmer with the motion. “I’ll wake you up when we’re entering the atmosphere so you won’t miss the landing.”

They’re shipping a bunch of new explosive laboratory chemicals Barry had whipped up, most of them swimming in zeta radiation, so Wally will be surprised if any sort of landing is ever made in one piece, but he’s not about to say that out loud. It’d probably jinx it.

“Fine,” Bart mumbles, settling at last. Wally flicks a switch with his pinkie finger and it dims the lights on Bart’s side of the cockpit. “But if you don’t get me up ten minutes before we enter atmosphere, I’m – I’m telling Aunt Iris on you.”

“Scary,” Wally drawls. Bart curls up in his chair and within a few minutes, he’s snoring.

It could end there. Really, it could. Wally’s whole voyage could drift to a dull end on the red surface of Mars and he could be on the way back to the last habitable scraps of Earth by 1500 hours, but then something just has to come out of nowhere and ram violently into the side of the cargo trailer.

Wally yells, his hands flying off of the levers from the impact. It nearly flings him out of his seat, but he manages to scramble a grip on the square wire port just as the sirens and alarms start screaming and flashing scarlet.

Bart isn’t so lucky. Wally’s head whips around just in time to see Bart thrown from his chair, limbs askew, before smashing into the window beside him with an unpleasant-sounding  _crunch_.

He screams, clutching his right arm, the elbow of which now protrudes at an entirely wrong angle. Wally yells his name like it’s supposed to help, but he doesn’t get much time to do anything else before the impact has rocked the ship again, this time from the left.

Bart only curls up in pain for a second before he’s gritted his teeth and hauled himself to his feet again, collapsing into his seat and yanking on his safety belt one-handed.

“That’s the  _last_  time I let you have a Europa burger for lunch!” he shouts to Wally, but despite the joke, his voice sounds high and strained with pain.

“Not a good time!” Wally barks back, but now that Bart is temporarily safe, he’s able to concentrate on the control board in front of him. He grips the twin levers and cranks all of his mental force into making the ship run faster, but it comes out feeble because he knows there’s no point: with the reactive cargo and the ship’s dead weight, he doesn’t have much hope for getting away from— _whatever the hell it is_  that just hit them for a third time.

“Does this happen often?” Bart demands in a yell. “Because suddenly, staying at home next time seems like a really fun option!”

“Shut up; I need to concentrate!” Wally snaps, glancing frantically into the rear view mirror. His eyes find it just in time to see something sleek and black slip out of view, and to be honest, he might not have even seen it had it not been for the neon green circuitry decorating its surface.

He sets his jaw and turns to Bart.

“Okay, you think you can handle a job for me?” he asks as quietly as he can while still being audible.

Bart nods a few too many times through wet eyes and a shaking lower lip.

“Stay right there,” Wally commands, pointing. “Right where you are. I’m gonna unplug, okay? I’m gonna unplug and try to get to the Flash. You stay  _right_  where you are unless it gets blown up, you got it?”

“Yeah,” Bart chokes out, still nodding. “Okay. Okay. Be careful, okay?” 

With a hardened expression, Wally grasps a bundle of wires, rapidly types in the detach code, and pulls them out of the ports on his right shoulder and elbow. It sends ripples of goosebumps through his bones and he grits his teeth.

He yanks out the others from his calves and left arm before carefully dragging away the thin ones attached to his temples, biting back a groan at the sensation of losing the ship, losing every electronic pulse and every shake and every scratch like he would lose a quart of blood.

He stands a little too quickly and his vision starts to tilt, but he blinks, hard, and sprints for the hall leading to the cargo hold. He slams his hands onto the wall when the ship tilts from another hit, scrambling harum-scarum down the hallway, furiously punching in the security code to the cargo hold, and leaping inside.

The Flash is docked, its wings folded up, unharmed. Wally pounds the button to unlock and open the overhead loading port, clambering as swiftly as he can while still viably staying on his feet into the cockpit of the zipcraft.

It hadn’t always been as fast as he’s tweaked and tuned it to be. A present from his mother and father on his sixteenth Earth birthday, it had been banged-up and a little decrepit, but they’d known how much he’d loved tinkering around, and he’s been flying it ever since, even though his mother has regularly voiced her disapproval that he uses it to engage in dogfights with wannabe space pirates trying to board Barry’s shipping vessel, the Nelson, and steal all of the goods in its hold.

Wally doesn’t even care. It tears through space like a bat out of hell, connected to him at every vein, and he loves it.

He plugs in and jams in the keys, revving up the near-silent motor and inhaling sharply at the energy that shoots through his limbs when the system powers up. The loading port is fully open, wide and yawning, so Wally unlocks and unfolds the wings, takes a deep breath, and wills the craft to take off.

It does, in a single vertical surge, and Wally and the Flash hang suspended in space for an instant before he floors the jet pedal and it shoots forward in a burst of speed.

He knows it’s stupid to be piloting without his flight suit. Staying insulated and keeping his heart rate even without the aid of the suit’s tech is basically impossible, but you don’t really have time for suiting up when your ship is being assaulted and damaged by an unknown party that has a 99% chance of being hostile, in Wally’s line of work.

And okay, he’s fine at steering those monolithic cargo ships about one degree to the right every two hours, but this –  _flight_ , unadulterated and dangerous and star-smearing – is what he’s really good at.

He grips the twin levers and yanks them to the right, veering the Flash around to face the Nelson fully. The second he does, his eyes catch on a flash of sleek onyx, darting underneath the cargo hold.

He smirks. Smart little hostile party.

Quietly but without dawdling, he slows his mental processes and lowers the Flash down after the other craft. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Bart, still seated where he’s supposed to be; what a pleasant surprise.

The Flash dips still lower, and Wally crouches, trying to catch a glimpse of the enemy before the enemy catches a glimpse of him. His breath sits in his throat, confined.

The sound of gunfire erupts around him before he feels a barrage of blasts against the underbelly of the Flash. He shouts, and pain darts up and down his arms and across his temples, and the Flash shudders and wobbles backwards, and through his pain-tinted eyes, Wally sees the black ship dart up from underneath and freeze in midair in front of him, two plasma guns pointing straight at the Flash’s cockpit, its circuitry skeleton illuminated in green. Wally can’t see into the cockpit, or any other part of it; it’s probably a one-way view sort of thing, but presently, it resembles an ebony horseshoe crab (he’d seen those, in a book, once), staring him down.

“Take all weapons offline,” a voice cuts in sharply on the radio, bursting with static. “Or I’ll be taking  _you_ offline.”

“Who are you?!” Wally shouts.

There’s a pause, and one of the plasma guns retreats, folding perfectly back into the seamless black.

“The people who’re gonna take those little cocktails for you,” the voice replies coolly, and it’s only then that Wally’s mind catches up to him: it’s a girl. “It’s obvious you’ve got your hands full, since we already did 60% damage to your ship.”

“We?” Wally exclaims, baffled.

Right on cue, another ship just like the attacker’s appears in his rear view, this one close in form to a manta ray, with aqua circuitry instead of green. Wally gulps.

“You realize I can’t let you take any of it,” he replies, like an idiot. “This cargo’s extremely dangerous and is only to be handled by myself and the designated government and scientific officials of Mars.”

“How dangerous can it be, if they’ve got a moron like you transporting it?” the voice chuckles, soft and raspy. “Just hand it over, Wall-man. That stuff’s for Rann.”

“Rann?” Wally blurts out incredulously. “What do they want with zeta chemicals? They’re decades behind Mars on the scientific plane; they wouldn’t know what to do with it!” He stiffens, cottoning on. “And how do you know my name?!”

“How about,” the voice drawls, “We listen to the girl driving the ship with the plasma guns? I think that sounds fair.” A whirring sound, and then three more guns appear, one on the right wing to match the one on the left, one atop the cockpit, and one below. “Don’t you?”

“Show your face,” Wally demands. “I don’t make deals with cowards.”

The girl hums indecisively and Wally swallows, a thick gulp, willing himself not to sweat. As far as he knows, they aren’t aware Bart’s inside the Nelson.

Startling him, the obsidian surface of what he assumes is the cockpit fades until it resembles only tinted glass. Wally squints, leans slightly forward, and loses his heartbeat somewhere along the way.

The pilot of the enemy ship isn’t a girl, but definitely a young  _woman_ , with a sleek blonde ponytail twisting over her shoulder and past where Wally can see; with hard, dark eyes and sinewy arms and a smirk carved into her ample lips. Her black top is cut off at the midriff with a neck that covers everything up to her jawline, but there’s a triangle at the chest that reveals skin that catches the starlight with ease.

She slings her arms across her twin lever steering system and rests her chin on them, blinking half-lidded down at him.

“You know, we were gonna just rob you and leave you here for dead,” she says quietly, “But I’m warming up to the idea of bringing you along with us. We’ve been needing a janitor.”

“Who  _are_  you?” Wally repeats in a much softer voice than he’s used to. She laughs, a high and throaty sound, and bows her head until her thick lashes cover her eyes.

“Artemis,” she answers, and then, suddenly, five other ships rise seemingly out of nowhere, surrounding the Flash and the Nelson, all of them sleek and black, all of them resembling anything from a boomerang to a hammerhead. Out of the corner of his eye, Wally sees two of them shoot hooked cables onto the cargo trailer, and when he looks back at Artemis, in all her terrifying splendor, her head is tilted, her ponytail cascading toward the floor.

“Your new captain.”

And that – thanks to the whole “not-wearing-a-flight-suit” thing – is right about where Wally suddenly and irreparably loses consciousness. 


End file.
